Dawn Clements, who died on December 4th at the age of 60 after a two-year battle with cancer, left behind a magnificent body of work, and alas, ambitious plans that will never be realized. She was as single-minded about drawing as any artist has ever been, and as open minded. A small sumi ink rendering of a wingback chair begun during a residency at Middlebury College grew, by added sheets of paper, into an immense panorama thirty-seven feet long, the size needed to portray her entire surroundings at the same intimate level of detail. In one way or another, she was always drawing her world, from the optical scatter of diamonds to the blunt signage of paper laundry tickets. (Clements liked to point out that jewels and scraps of printed matter had equal value as drawings.) She came to embrace a self-sufficient tautology which all artists understand in their own way, but few with such clarity of purpose. As she put it in a 2007 interview with her gallerist Susan Swenson: “Where I live is my studio and the subject of my work is where I live.”

One day she took a small black and white television into the studio in order not to miss a Douglas Sirk melodrama. She was struck by bits of dialogue and jotted them down on a convenient surface. “All of a sudden,” as she said in the same interview, “the still life seemed to become animated.” It was the beginning of marking her drawings with the wordage of passing time –– thoughts, lists, things overheard, things read. It was also the opening of a window in her studio, a small black and white one, onto fictional dimensions, perpendicular axes awaiting exploration. Soon she was not only writing down dialogue but drawing directly from her television.

Clements studied the semiotics of film as an undergraduate, and she had a sophisticated critical appreciation of the medium, but it was soap operas and weepy “women’s films” that came to occupy her as an artist, culminating in major works such as Travels with Myra Hudson (2004; Saatchi Collection), and Mrs. Jessica Drummond’s (‘My Reputation,’ 1946) (2010). The first is a meditation on a Joan Crawford vehicle with noir overtones, and the second derives from a Barbara Stanwyck society drama as polished as a toaster. Both feature strong, independent women looking for love but trapped in their blandly tasteful décor, their gilded cages. It was these Hollywood studio interiors that intrigued Clements more than the narratives, per se, or the films’ inscrutable, photogenic stars. In her own “studio” she forensically reverse-engineered the sets with as much clarity as she could, via flickering low-resolution video frames, and having to guess at background details that might be in shadow or out of focus. Pausing the playback, Clements found frames where ashtrays and bedspreads, wallpaper and perfume bottles emerged from behind the actors, or were revealed by a new camera angle (often noting the video timecode and dialogue on the drawings). The erasure, for the most part, of the actors as the space they left behind was liquidly unfolded and deciphered, induced a psychologically potent side effect. Their absence allows the viewer to enter archetypal precincts, where scenarios of love, loss and heroic sacrifice are enacted forever.

In Myra Hudson, Clements made her most explicit mapping of film, by representing  — right to left — a fateful train journey from New York to San Francisco. A view out one compartment window shows the plains in daylight, while the next window jumps ahead to a reflection of the train interior at night. The panorama passes  through ambiguous outlines in dreamy blank spaces to lead us smoothly into Myra’s San Francisco mansion, up an ominous staircase, and into the heroine’s study, where cruelly ironic scenes will unfold. This is as close to storyboarding the spacetime of film as Clements got. On the whole, she expanded her film panoramas purely by spatial contiguity –– Jessica Drummond’s bedroom being attached to her bathroom, and so on –– just as she did with drawings of her immediate surroundings, one piece of paper folding under, a new one gluing on until the drawing came to rest. When it would be fully opened for the first time, the joints and folds in the paper would remain prominent.

The TV in Clements’s studio was her portal from domestic still life into ancient mythopoeic saga, which is fair enough, since such stories are a part of life, and always have been –– as real as a turnip on a kitchen table. One comes to realize that reality and fiction flip everywhere in Clements work. Her drawings of film spaces are also, of course, analytic renderings of actual sets and props. As for the artist’s encyclopedic drawings of her immediate surroundings, they trade on the traditional fictions of still life in the way that disjunctive local spaces and times are fused under a continuous skin of illusion. Kitchen and Bathroom, for example (2004; collection Whitney Museum of American Art), is a monumental chronicle in sumi ink of her Brooklyn railroad apartment at gritty, Ivan-Albright resolution. It is a flash-lit snapshot that surely took months. The drawing’s fantastic continuum of cramp and clutter serves as a kind of doppelganger to the palatial bedrooms of Jessica Drummond or Myra Hudson. And from a certain point of view, Kitchen and Bathroom is no less cinematic –– one can easily imagine the drawing as a panning background for cel animation, with characters jumping from chair to stove to bathtub as the camera tracks along.

Clements’s panoramic formats, often wrapping around the walls of exhibitions, would have been enough to merit video-chronicler James Kalm’s description of her work as “expanded drawing.” Kalm, however, was also calling attention to the great variety of formats that Clements embarked on a without missing a beat, from vertical “tiltoramas” (as she called them), which travel from her foot to the ceiling and down the other wall; to a Dürer-like study of a single patch of weedy lawn, drawn every day for a month; to a multi-year collaboration with sculptor Marc Leuthold in which she drew a grouping of his sculptures that had been closely modeled, in turn, on her drawings. In every case, she was just drawing what she saw.

Yet it was still life drawings–– very much in the tradition of that genre, for all their irregularly-shaped, rumpled, and annotated eccentricities–– that increasingly came to occupy Clements in the last years of her life. These watercolor masterpieces feature over-life-size fruit, vegetables, and bunches of flowers, maximal challenges for the artists’ ever-sharpening ability to see and describe. With the introduction of color around 2005 –– returning to her roots in painting, though not without misgivings –– Clements had expanded again. Using careful layers of translucent watercolor, she could now capture the waxy glistening of apples, melons and plums. She could enumerate the chromatic foldings of tulips, peonies, hyacinths and chrysanthemums, and solve the crinklings of their green leaves, the knobby fibers of their intertwining stalks, and their reflections and refractions through curved glass vases full of water.

As with Van Gogh’s sunflowers and irises, Clements’s floral still lifes are demonstrations of an ardent kind of mastery that conventional skill can’t touch. Leo Steinberg, in his 1953 essay The Eye is a part of the Mind, was reminding an avant-garde that had little use for representation about the ways in which fresh looking could fire neurons. Taking the exuberant early Renaissance anatomies of Pollaiolo as an example, Steinberg wrote: “Like all works connected with discoveries of representation, his pictures lack the sweet ease of accomplishment. His images are ever aborning, swelling into space and taking life, like frozen fingers tingling as they warm. It is not facts they purvey; it is the thrill and wonder of cognition.” If both Clements’s and Van Gogh’s flower paintings rise miles above easy sentiments normally attaching to the subject, it’s because one thrills and wonders along with the artists in their rapture of discovery.

Many of Clements’s last works, with and without flowers, also depict the colorful packaging of cancer medications. Just another laundry ticket, as it were. And just another vanitas –– one warning among many about the bittersweetness of passing time. Vanitas, indeed, was in her method. In Peonies (2014), a supremely gorgeous work, Clements replaced, as she often did, an area of the drawing with a fresh piece of paper. In the process, she sliced off the side of a lush red blossom (probably what had displeased her). When she resumed the drawing, apparently the blossom had wilted, falling forward a bit, and there she drew it, leaving the hard edge of the blossom’s previous incarnation behind, embedded in the daily fabric of her practice. This memento mori is echoed in the lower right by the ripe young face of thirties star Sylvia Sidney –– a drawing of a drawing, it seems, which was pinned to the studio wall behind the flowers. Clements told Eve Aschheim in a 2007 interview in the Brooklyn Rail that she was planning to bring figures back into the work, and in Peonies she left us with a transfixing hint about where things might have gone.

In writing this tribute to Dawn’s work, I watched a few of the melodramas lyrically transfigured in her drawings. One thing that struck me in the films was the consummate tact of dialogue and behavior, even during emotional eruptions. Perhaps social relations really were more formal, more beautiful then. John Yau, with exactitude, described the works in Dawn’s final show at Pierogi as “love letters to the world.” (The full review on Hyperallergic is mandatory reading.) Yes, love letters, and –– I hope I may add –– disciplined and gracious ones, as if written by the radiant heroines in the films she loved.

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October 15 to November 14, 2015
531 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11h avenues
New York City, 212 331 8888

In her final show at Mixed Greens (this much-valued gallery is, sadly, closing) Joan Linder trains her lucid, maniacal drawing practice on a notorious environmental disaster close to her Buffalo home. This 1970s toxic phenomenon known as “Love Canal,” a name that must have made Burroughs, Pynchon and DeLillo giggle, confirmed an emerging environmental zeitgeist, fed by revelations of governmental fecklessness verging on murder. Linder documents this original superfund wasteland –– from which working class families were finally removed after unheard-of birth defect and cancer rates, and which remains fenced off forty years later –– by recording with her indefatigable pen, across the folds of accordion notebooks, seemingly every chain-link and blade of grass of the full perimeter. Displayed on wrap-around shelves, these encyclopeadic landscapes include indications of the site’s surrounding ecosystem of weeds and highways, telephone lines and old tires, much as in Rackstraw Downes’s deceptively neutral vistas, or analogously, in the household clutter of Dawn Clements’s panoramic interiors. In addition, Linder’s circumambulating drawings pack a punch as a group, as a project, that has something to do with Gordon Matta-Clark’s or Peter Fend’s subversive mappings of ideas hiding in plain sight –– or rather, site.

You could argue that in the past Linder has commented obliquely on post-feminist discourse, by rendering a colossally unwashed pile of dishes; and that the antiseptic delusions of science were slyly addressed in her exhaustive drawings from the inner sancta of biology and pathology labs. But with the Love Canal project Linder raises the political ante. Inaugurating a pure research vector, the artist displays in glass-topped vitrines neat rows of official reports and memos, blown leaves from the disaster’s decades-long paper trail –– or rather, they are illusionistic pen and ink renderings of such documents. Text has been caught before in Linder’s observational web, but in situ, casually strewn along with the books, signs and scraps of paper of a larger still life. The new document drawings for the first time take an overt angle of attack, and without giving up an inch of empiricism.

There is intention in the laboriousness and redundancy of the artist’s pilgrimage across these typewritten cover pages, fuzzy photographs, and charts and graphs, which are clearly the tip of a file-cabinet-and-microfiche iceberg. Linder’s stubborn simulacrum of bureaucratic paralysis means to cast a dispiriting pall –– but also, a fascinating one. A weird sort of fun, even, develops out of Linder’s characteristic obsession with every trompe-l’oeil detail of her quarry, including the mimeograph burn, feedback distortion and document decay of the “originals” –– which seem, in fact, to be xeroxes of xeroxes of xeroxes.

Each typed letter of each hall-of-mirrors document is rendered as legibly as the source allows. For those inclined to dip in, the rewards get more Kafkaesque, with chains of inference that run beyond mere corporate greed into shameful state secrets: ultimately to the infamous Project Sunshine (Linder’s exhibition title), an Atomic Energy Commission program that snatched bodies for the purpose of studying long-term health effects in the event of nuclear war. At the very least, Linder shows that Hooker Chemical, Love Canal’s toxifier, was a deep player in the military-industrial complex, like any large rustbelt concern. The limitless electrical capacity of Niagara Falls, into which Love Canal drains, is what put the region at the epicenter of the environmentally oblivious Cold War economy, before it plunged. Perhaps there’s something in the water, as Linder’s artist colleagues at SUNY Buffalo, notably Steven Kurz, have put a research-oriented, activist stamp on art from the area, to which Linder is in the process of making a necessary contribution (the Love Canal project is ongoing). Mark Lombardi was also from the region, Syracuse being a few stops along the Erie Canal; and it is worth pointing out that Linder’s research, like Lombardi’s, is not conspiratorial, in that the art is built entirely from public records –– known facts –– released documents.

Some conspiracy theories, however, turn out to be true: for starters, there’s the still-partly-classified Project Sunshine (yet another name, like Love Canal –– or Hooker Chemical, for crying out loud –– that would put a dystopian black humorist to shame). And Linder alludes, with a few cover pages of meticulously redrawn bureaucratrese, to a far worse government conspiracy: a local adjunct of the Manhattan Project, it seems, that was run out of the University of Rochester. The title of this report includes the phrase “CHANGES IN BODY TEMPERATURE IN RESPONSE TO URANIUM INJECTIONS,” and presumably is related to known U.S. Government programs in which deliberately misinformed, unwitting prisoners, chiefly minority, were irradiated for “science” –– sometimes fatally. Which is not all that far from concurrent experiments by Nazi doctors on concentration camp inmates (although these, at least, ceased with the war’s end; the Rochester document is dated 1946.) What Linder seems to be asking is: How many pages of obfuscatory memoranda does it take to get from there to signing off on building housing and schools on a known toxic waste dump?

Exhibited along with the documents and the accordion landscapes are two large, grandly luxurious color ink drawings, meticulous delineations of the interweaving patterns of weeds in an unkempt backyard –– presumably in Niagara County, maybe even on the overgrown site of Love Canal itself. (For that matter, in that locus of poisons it can’t matter very much which side of the superfund fence the ground is on.) Where pebbly dirt peeks through, the ink is shades of brown, contrasting with the green weeds above, which are outlined strategically with black. This consistent division of color from top to bottom layer makes for a crisply vibrating visual texture that at a distance approaches the richness of a William Morris endpaper design or a chinoiserie folding screen. Up close one sees the slight waver of a tireless hand, drawing a plot of ground at actual size, as if that inch-by-inch attention might bring, to scorched earth, a measure of remediation.

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Stanley Lewis’s work is the obverse of what one might think of as a downtown aesthetic. His paintings and drawings, now on view at Betty Cuningham’s new Lower East Side home, carry a real one-two punch. Here are deliberately banal subjects — backyards, suburban scenes, calendar views of Lake Chautauqua — transformed by a brilliant but tortured way of realizing a painterly image that can yield work of rare satisfaction and ambition.

The fascination he arouses comes partially from an almost irreconcilable tension between working directly from observation, with exacting attention to small forms, and a very contemporary, almost sculptural painting process that builds a work with obsessively dense materiality. Cloth and paint are built up by cutting and repositioning pieces of worked canvas that will be reconnected, at least partially, with a loaded brush, painting wet into wet, layer upon layer. This often leaves bare staples, gaps, and deep scars that resist integration with the image.

In his larger works, Lewis is often seen trying to correct initial estimates of how much surface is needed to chart the movement of the eye from near to far, so that the space of the picture can make sense as a world. As he focuses on a specific area, it expands to fill his field of vision, fragmenting a sense of the whole. If Lewis wanted to cover the tracks of his labors he easily could, but the point of his work, evidently, is not a view of nature alone, nor is it just a correspondence between built up paint and the presence of things. Instead, we are invited to move back and forth from the world depicted to the traces of his process. Ultimately, Lewis’s sucker punch is to shift our attention from quotidian views to his inner experience of looking and making, to the meditative adventure of what painting can be.

As I was looking back and forth between three terrific works in the gallery’s back space, Lewis’s distinct quality of light on partly cloudy days became evident. In Boat on the Beach, Lake Chautauqua (2013) and even more so in Backyard Jeykll Island, GA (2014), a subtle pink tone suffuses the air, transforming the everyday into a glimpse of reality enchanted. This surprisingly recalled Jess’s magical Translation paintings, which also share with Lewis a charmed light and an irrational play between image and a lapidary surface of thickly applied paint, erupting here and there into incongruous lumps. The third painting, Winslow Park, Westport (2010-2014), and the most recent work at the gallery’s entrance, Matt Farnham’s Farm with Truck (2014), share a cooler blue-green quality no less captivating than the others.

Structural ideas vary from picture to picture: a traditional repoussoir of dark trees frames the central vortex of space in Farm with Truck; in Winslow Park, a tree masked by a telephone pole serves as a pictorial axis using wires above and the gated fence below to extend their reach backward and forward into space. A network of silhouettes and shadows orchestrates Jeykll Island and diagonal paths of thickly worked rivulets of grasses and clouds open the space against the horizon in Boats on a Beach.

Perhaps the most unusual and surprising structure is featured in the show’s largest work, an elaborate paper bas-relief, Hemlock Trees Seen from Upstairs Window in the Snow (2007-2014), made with pencil on layers of cut and carved print paper. This irregularly-shaped snowbound landscape is partially modulated through the physical modeling of the paper, allowing the dominant central tree to float, as if we were watching a slow motion explosion of limbs moving outward in all directions. This is the show’s knockout punch. His master work captures the eerie grey light of a soft snow fall that carries an unmistakable air of fatality.

Thinking about this and other fine drawings on view, it is hard to miss correspondences between Lewis’s work and School of London artists like Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. Closer to home and recent innovation are the drawn mappings of Dawn Clements and recent tree photographs of Mike and Doug Starn. All these artists share with Lewis an interest in the reinvention of realism by piecing together literal fragments of paper that re-synthesize the image. Lewis’s crazy-quilt painting process stands for the dignity of his unique experience. This is the source of what is so disconcerting, so irritating and so crucial in his work.

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